The market today, beyond generic mobile apps
Most people's first experience of AI fiction today comes from general-purpose mobile apps: chat with a character, ask for a story, roleplay a scenario. These apps have proved the demand is enormous. They have also, in our view, set expectations far too low. Most have no authored world, characters with no history beyond a paragraph of description, no memory you can trust and no story that goes anywhere. They are conversation, not narrative. Generic is the stage this medium has to grow out of.
A third layer on every device
Step back from games for a moment and look at how people use their devices. For thirty years a computer has had two main layers: classical apps, from games to productivity software, and the web browser, the window onto information sites and web applications. AI Generators are becoming a third layer beside them. On the desktop that layer already includes AI chat, agent harnesses and a new wave of AI-first development tools. On mobile it is creative tools and Story Generators. In VR it will be chat worlds and video Story Generators that surround the player.
Beyond those apps, the serious work is spread across five areas:
- Canon-led story works. Studios writing complete worlds, story bibles and casts of characters, and using models to perform them. This is the core of the Story Generator field and still the smallest part of it.
- Authoring tools. Software that lets writers build canon in a structured way (characters, locations, timelines, secrets, rules) and see how a model performs it. This is the equivalent of the engine and level editor in classical games, and it barely exists yet.
- Memory and continuity. Systems that let a world remember a player across days and weeks without contradicting itself. We cover the design questions in Memory is the new save file.
- Voice and performance. Open-weight expressive voice models such as Fish Audio's Drama 3 make it possible for a generated line to be acted, not just read.
- World models. Models that generate explorable, interactive video worlds in real time: Google DeepMind's Genie 3, announced in August 2025, generates navigable worlds at 720p and 24 frames per second that stay consistent for a few minutes. Open models are following fast: Matrix-Game 4.0, WorldPlay2, SolarWM H3 Realtime and Viggle's JST-2.
Today these pieces mostly live apart. A world model can show you a place but does not know who lives there. A language model can voice a character but cannot show you her street. The next phase of the medium is about joining them, with canon as the thread that runs through every layer.